The "Messed up" school system

When you were a kid, you heard all the time that each person is different from another so why when you go to school the educational system forces you to learn what they want to teach and what they think is important to you to succeed? To make things worse, even the things you love to do and you are good at, are considered less important than math or history. Therefore, they make 30 kids, everyone is so different from the other, sit in a room for 8 hours every day and study the same things.Albert Einstein once said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid"(quora).The school system is an ancient institution and nothing has changed in the last years, even with all the progress around it. Let us look at the progress of phones for example, so much has changed in the last few years one can say the same about cars. So, why has the school system not changed? Why does it make the students feel like fish that need to climb trees? Why makes them think they are useless and stupid? "Schools kill creativity" says Sir Ken Robinson because it judges the children by their grades and not by their abilities or skills. Children are 20% of our population but they are 100% our future. So, what do schools do? Prepare children for the future or chains them to the past?Every kid is different from each other. Scientists say that every brain is much different from each other. Ask a mother with two kids and she would tell you that they are different so how do you expect the students to get the same results in the same lessons when they are so different from each other. Outcomes are important: they reflect how well we expect students to do. But expecting everyone to reach the same level is naïve and, in light of the unequal resources schools have, also cynical. Why is it important to do what you love and not let others tell you what to do? Giving you grades for things that you don’t relate to and that you are not interested in is contradictory to logic. Take a look, for example, at some people that succeed without finishing school. They succeeded in things they loved and they got passion for like Steve Jobs, one of the great minds that we know and Matt Graining the creator of the Simpsons. All of them succeeded without a diploma. They are brilliant in their own way and they follow their own path. My Point of ViewIn my point of view, the school system is the most important system in the world because it designs the people of the tomorrow: the next doctors and scientists, engineers and the next politicians that will rule this world. So, why when the world is so advanced the most important system stays behind and does not take care of the people that work for it. The teachers are not less important than doctors because they are the people that make the new doctors and scientist so let's take the education system one step ahead and let the children have more fun to study and not be upset when they wake up for school. By doing this, we can change the world of the future. Providing all resources to the next generation to learn and have fun from it and let them do what they like and love and that makes them do it in the best way and push it to the edge.

Relevance to the StoryIn the story we read about the life of an African- American girl and the struggle that she has been through with her mother being ill. Geraldine, the heroine, has to work when she is still at school and that affects her grades and her grades are not good because she is not interested in the regular school subjects. But when she is asked to write a poem for homework, she produces the best poem in class because she wrote about her life and her personal experience from a miserable reality. She discovered that she is actually talented at expressing her pain and frustration in writing. This shows that when a person follows his unique ability and fosters his talent, he can succeed – even without the school's support.

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Author

Shalev Cohen

- 18 years old- lives in Karmiel, a small town in the Western Galilee- His English teacher, Mrs. Osnat Dumen, has urged him to put into writing some of his thoughts and beliefs. The result is this candid and thought-provoking opinion paper.